The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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October 29, 2011

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 4

You know how it works by now – at least, you know how it works if you've read this, that or the other. A fiver, a bookshop and an attempt to escape the customary seasonal shite . . . .

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, part IV. The hebdomadal challenge is to find a neglected work or curiosity by an established author in one of London’s secondhand bookshops, for about £5. Some readers have misinterpreted the purpose as pleasure, but it is medicinal. We require a weekly antidote to the toxins released into the bookselling system by certain mainstream publishers. The virus mutates: A Shite History of Nearly Everything, Shite’s Original Miscellany, Eats, Shites and Leaves, Do Ants Have Arseholes?

The Archive Bookstore at 83 Bell Street, a short hop from Marylebone Station, is a tonic in itself. Here are the bountiful outdoor barrows full of LPs, books and sheet music. Here is the aproned counterhand, polite and helpful, undaunted by the Sisyphean task of shifting cartons of books to permit access to shelves, only to obscure other shelves. There goes the proprietor down to the basement, from where he conjures Chopin variations on the piano with wooden keys.

If eager to improve your language skills, visit the Archive. Packed into excavated recesses on the way to the basement are books in foreign languages. Dig through one layer to uncover the New Testament in Danish; dig deeper for David Irving’s study of Hitler in German; archaeological tenacity and a torch reveal Jane Austen’s Sentido y sensibilidad. We were briefly tempted by Volume I of The Brothers Karamazov yoked together as a pair with Volume II of War and Peace.

Instead, we lighted on a genuine curiosity: Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. Few, even among Highsmith’s admirers, are aware of this enlightening book. It was published in 1983 by Poplar Press of South London. The advice is practical and down to earth. She prefers an opening sentence “in which something moves and gives action”, and sure enough almost all her novels begin with movement:

"The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm." (Strangers on a Train)

"Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way." (The Talented Mr Ripley)

"It was jealousy that kept David from sleeping, drove him from a tousled bed to walk the streets." (This Sweet Sickness)

She wishes to suggest “a bottling up of force that will one day explode”. The action is needed because “the reader does not want to be all at once plunged into a sea of complex facts”. Her advice extends to writing in general: for example, that the last sentence of a chapter, a section, even a paragraph, can often be cut to the benefit of what has gone before.

The Archive charged us £3.50 for Highsmith’s wisdom. We bought a stack of other books as well. The man in the apron kindly knocked a few pounds off the total.

Comments

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A sharp post. Perhaps even more interesting as a subject would be the rhetoric of the paragraph's final substantive sentence.

[The old lady explained to Kim, in a tense, indignant whisper, precisely what manner and fashion of malignant liar he was. Had Kim hinted this when she was a girl, he would have been pommelled to death that same evening by an elephant. This was perfectly true.] "Kim," Chapter 4.

Not only is the free indirect counterfactual a beautiful sentence in itself, it is also a useful template in considering the free indirect future conditions at the ends of paragraphs in Michael Asher's "Khartoum."

Asher is crafty in his micro-focusing at the ends of paragraphs. A thoughtful study of the COBUILD English Grammar on adverbial subordination will stimulate analysis of clusters such as result and manner clauses that can tighten focus at paragraph ends. Quotes often have penetrating force in last sentences.

I have yet to see a comprehensive account of all the resources for final sentences in paragraphs, from sound patterning to philosophical depth. There is no modern rhetoric based on ancient rhetoric that makes good contact with this absorbing rhetorical task.

The Fishmonger's advice on how to write and read sentences can be safely ignored.

'Talisman Books' in Marple Bridge is conveniently close to the surgery: if the doctor's running late and you've got half an hour, you can nip in and get something to read instead of back copies of 'National Geographic' and 'The Economist'. And half an hour was easily long enough, the other day, to have one's eye caught by a 1947 edition of Walter de la Mare's 'Desert Islands' (1930), a magnificent jumble of a book - with illustrations by Rex Whistler - that starts off as a study of the desert island in literature but soon turns into a Shandyesque romp through - well, in the words of the TLS review - 'scraps of old sea-tales, corners of ancient maps, misers and murderers, pepper and pines and pirates, Bacon, More, Gulliver, Jules Verne, St. Anthony of Egypt, Enoch Arden and Spenser's island of the Idle Lake - every hint, in short, upon which a poet's imagination can be set winging towards the realms of solitude and dream'.

To be honest, it cost a pound more than the £5:00 allowed by the rules, but the rococo title alone was surely worth the extra. As De la Mare declares, with an Augustan flourish that makes you settle more deeply and gratefully into your chair, 'Authors of the Eighteenth Century delighted in copious subtitles. These had one signal merit; they saved the reader further trouble'. His own time-saving title follows;

'DESERT ISLANDS: being the VOYAGE of a HULK, called by courtesy a 'Lecture', that was launched under the Auspices of 'The Royal Society of Literature' of London many years ago, namely, in 1920, was afterwards frequently in Dock again for repair and then refitted for FARTHER ADVENTURINGS, and so at length became laden with an unconscionable Cargo of Odds and Ends and Flotsam and Jetsam, much of it borrow'd from other Vessels infinitely more Seaworthy than itself, and the most of that concern'd with what are known as ISLANDS, some of them Real, some of them Allegorical, and the rest purely Fabulous; together with a rambling Discourse concerning a certain very Famous Man of Letters, viz. DANIEL DEFOE, and his Elective Affinity, ROBINSON CRUSOE: which, being concocted in a most Unmethodical Fashion, is now presented to a World already groaning under an intolerable Burden of Printed Matter by its Humble Servant the Author, and dedicated to his son DICK, MDCCCCXXX'.